Pages

Monday, 19 February 2018

Poorly-worded codes of conduct

Below is the actual text (minus personally identifying information) that I have sent to the FreeBSD team for consideration.

To: conduct@freebsd.org
From: A. Wilcox
Subject: Violation
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 22:20:21 -0600
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.2.0
Hello FreeBSD team,
My name:
A. Wilcox
[alt emails redacted]
Names of those involved:
A. Wilcox
IRC nicks: [redacted]
When and where the incident occurred:
2014-2016 on IRC, possibly 2017 in email traffic
Your account of what occurred:
I hugged a great many people. Some were group hugs of celebration (we
fixed a bug! *hugs*). Some were hugs of consolation, like the loss of
a loved one. Some were hugs to and from those I had not communicated
with in a great number of years.
There may have been some on mailing lists as well. I am not very sure,
as that is not typically something I do on mailing lists (it is more of
a live / chat thing), but it is possible. Likely, even, if you include
private traffic between me and some of the regulars that used to hang
out together all the time.
Any extra context:
This CoC is demeaning and insensitive to people like me who have
emotional disabilities and need to give and receive hugs (at least
virtually) to feel better, and has a chilling effect on discussion due
to poorly defined word choices.
For instance: why does it only ban "gratuitous" sexual images, but
typing a hug is an immediate violation?
Are truthful comments between two people that care that maybe they
should live a healthier lifestyle "unwelcome"? I had a very long and
blunt talk with someone on IRC about their drug use, and they are now
years sober partially due to that "unwelcome" discussion.
In addition, making so many explicit bullet-points invites rule
lawyering, trolling about what is and is not a rule violation, and
leaves so many things up to interpretation as to be unhelpful.
I wish to be banned from this community so I am not tempted to
contribute to it again, as the CoC is almost as toxic as the behaviour
it is trying to prevent.
Is the incident ongoing:
Until the CoC is rewritten; yes.
Any other information you should have:
Yes, better CoCs that are not offensive, insensitive, demoralising, or
demeaning:
* https://www.djangoproject.com/conduct/
* https://www.alpinelinux.org/community/code-of-conduct.html
Sincerely,
--arw
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)